Espace populations sociétés (Jul 2015)

L’invention des routines

  • Frédéric de Coninck

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/eps.5951
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2015, no. 2

Abstract

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Speaking of routines, in social sciences easily carries connotations related to alienation. Routines, it is said, come from the fact that individuals and households, depend on heavy macro-social time constraints that impose their mechanical time on their daily schedules. Individual agency is thus supposed to be built on fluidity and on improvisation in situation.Such a point of view has already been discussed by some research works. We come back to that point, speaking of daily schedules organisation, in a context where individuals and households are mainly struggling, today, to protect their time against an unstructured, chopped, heterogeneous time.Individuals and households build routines to preserve their time. They use a series of devices, mixing social and technical resources, to manage more comfortably their daily lives.Relying on a survey by semi-structured interviews, we describe this activity of inventing, testing, strengthening, changing those routines in this paper.

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